It's Only A Gamebook... Isn't It?

If ever any television series was crying out to be adapted for a series of adventure gamebooks, it was Knightmare. And that’s exactly what happened, with six books published between 1988 and 1993.

(There was also a seventh book, Lord Fear’s Domain, which will not be covered in this article for two reasons. The first is that it wasn’t a gamebook but a straightforward puzzle book, and the second is that I can’t find a cheap copy online. For the record, books #1, #2, #4 and #6 were ones I owned from my childhood, and books #3 and #5 were purchased second-hand for the purposes of this article. Where were we?)

Each book is split into two halves – a novella running to between 70 and 115 pages, and then the adventure game itself, which ran to anywhere between 90 and 170 sections. (The reasons for the dramatic differences in length will become clear in due course.) For each book, I watched an episode of the television series that would have been broadcast around the time the book was released, and then played the game and compared the two. (Alternatively, I just rambled on about the book for a bit.) The only way is onward – there is no turning back!

Knightmare: Can You Beat the Challenge?

Published: 23 September 1988

Written by: Tim Child and Dave Morris

Illustrated by: David Rowe (Not credited, interestingly)

I’m pretty sure that front cover scared me quite a lot as a child. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one.

This book was published midway through the second series, and the only episode of that run I could find on YouTube was episode 9. I’m sure you’re familiar with Knightmare if you’re reading this piece, so I won’t recap the whole show for you. Each room requires the player’s friends to answer riddles and questions, or shout instructions to get them out of trouble as quickly as possible. There are plenty of occasions where they have to cast a spell by spelling it out one letter at a time, and get things wrong amusingly frequently.

The first hundred pages of the book are taken up by the novella, which is actually quite good and tells the tale of how Treguard reclaimed his ancestral home of Knightmare Castle. As far as tie-in fiction based on childrens’ TV shows goes, this is probably one of the better ones. But how does the gamebook section measure up?

The gamebook uses the Life Force mechanic employed by the show. Whereas the show used it as a clock the challengers had to beat, in the book your Life Force degrades by one level every time you use a ‘gate, door or portal’. As the only levels of Life Force are green, amber and red, this can be a bit frustrating and tricky to keep track of.

The game takes the interesting step of offering three different adventures: ‘slightly difficult’, ‘harder’ or ‘hardest’. As the game only has 105 sections, this seems like it’s over-reaching itself a bit, but the game replicates the programme as best it can; each adventure is made up of a variety of different rooms where you have to answer riddles or use logic. In Clue Rooms you have to choose which items to take forward. You can get spells, although obviously the book is unable to replicate the ‘shouting which letter to say next’ bit. The book has a similar sense of humour to the TV series, and also a similar lack of plot, but that does help with the authentic feel of the text. The book is keen to put in cheaters’ traps on a number of occasions (e.g. giving the option to use a spell that doesn’t exist, or to use all three items from a Clue Room when you can only take two), which somehow feels very in keeping with the show’s spirit (various recurring characters from the show such as Granitas also show up). There’s a deliberately unreachable ‘easter egg’ section (section 42, if you’re curious) which is a bit of fun.

Perhaps surprisingly, the book doesn’t really try to do anything that would be completely unmanageable on the show’s budget, and feels all the more authentic for it. (That said, some of the death scenes are a bit gruesome, in contrast to the TV show which managed to get Mary Whitehouse to apologise after she criticised the ‘deaths’ of the dungeoneers without watching it.) I feel the need to qualify that last sentence by saying that Knightmare’s graphics are actually really good – but it would still have been easy for the book to try and top them. Also, this paragraph seems to have ended up as a bit of a mess.

Overall, this first book (some debate seems to exist over whether “Can you beat the challenge?” was part of the title or just a tagline) is not particularly memorable as an adventure game by itself, but if you were a Knightmare fan when this was released, you would probably have enjoyed this as about as faithful an interpretation of the show as you could get in print. (For some reason the Helm of Justice is still present, but doesn’t impair your vision as you’re on your own, which feels like it maybe misses the point a bit.)

(Also: for some reason, the Knightmare article on Wikipedia is under the impression that there isn’t an adventure game part to this book, and that was only introduced for the second book. No, I don’t know why either.)

Knightmare: The Labyrinths of Fear

Published: 22 September 1989

Written by: Dave Morris

Illustrated by: David Rowe (Still not credited)

The novella, telling another adventure of Treguard’s and a gathering of his fellow knights, is similarly well-written, goes for a smaller scale and even has quite a bit of continuity from the first one. In fact, the continuity of all six novellas is pretty strong – I wonder if these were written closer together than they were published. (Interestingly, around this time in the TV show Treguard was being portrayed as more neutral, whereas the novellas have him as more heroic, and the gamebook section explicitly has him side with the dungeoneer – something he didn’t start doing in the TV show until around Series 5.)

The changes to the gamebook segment are altogether more interesting. At 170 sections, this game is considerably longer than the first one (the next two books would also be around that number), and it’s all one big adventure, so its scale and scope are much bigger. The Life Force rules have changed, so every time you take injury it degrades rather than every time you enter a new room (probably in part because this adventure is so much bigger). It’s no longer attempting to be a measure of time, as it sort-of was in the first gamebook, so maybe it’s a step away from trying to capture a flavour of the TV show. The Clue Rooms are now gone, although inventory management still works in a similar way, with the book periodically giving you a list of items you can take (with an inventory cap of 5). The gamebook is also more directly related to the novella, which makes for a more interesting read (although that said, it does still feel fairly plotless).

Other than that, things are much the same – riddles to solve, moving from one room to the next to solve the next riddle/problem. It’s slightly more ambitious (and more successful in its ambition) than the first one (that it’s longer allows it to integrate the riddles and their answers better and there aren’t as many blind alleys that lead to instant death), but recognisably in the same spirit. A watch of an episode from the third series, broadcast around the time this book was released, indicates that not all that much had changed on the show either.

Knightmare 3: Fortress of Assassins

Published: 21 September 1990

Written by: Dave Morris

Illustrated by: David Rowe (Still not bloody credited)

The fourth series of Knightmare marked a major departure. The show’s producers felt that the CGI dungeon crawler had perhaps reached its limit, and location footage was used instead for a lot of the series, opening things up to the outside world. Unfortunately (and this perhaps backs up my theory that these were written closer together than the release dates suggest), Fortress of Assassins singularly fails to capitalise on this.

The novella is up to the standards of the first two, but includes the interesting twist that it is set during Treguard’s hitherto unmentioned five years in the Holy Land in the early thirteenth century, making use of figures from legend. It’s a pity this doesn’t really carry over to the gamebook.

Although the TV series had started setting sequences outdoors now, the gamebook did not, and consequently we’re in for a third consecutive dungeon crawler directly inspired by the TV series. It’s the first book in the series to require dice, but they’re only ever used to determine blind chance, and other than that there’s nothing at all to distinguish it from the previous two (apart from being less reliant on the traps for cheaters – indeed, there’s a rather odd section which seems to sort of encourage cheating, which isn’t really in the spirit of knights’ chivalry the books keep going on about). It’s entertaining enough, I suppose (and I’m quite fond of some of the riddles, which have some amusing misdirection), but it’s pretty unremarkable as a gamebook.

Knightmare 4: The Sorcerer’s Isle

Published: 19 September 1991

Written by: Dave Morris

Illustrated by: David Rowe (Credited. Only joking, of course he wasn’t)

This is something else. The novella is a direct sequel to the previous one, with King Richard and the Holy Land and whatnot, and is up to its standard – probably the best yet, actually, which certainly sets the scene for the gamebook section.

(I feel I’ve not really mentioned the first four novellas enough throughout this piece, but then I find literary criticism rather harder than talking about the mechanics of adventure gamebooks – they do expand the show’s universe in a rather interesting way, and they’re an interesting curio as licensed fiction based on a CITV gameshow. They’re almost certainly far better than I’ve made them sound.)

The gamebook section finally catches up with the show: hardly any of it is set in Knightmare Dungeon. Just from looking at the rules, it’s obvious something is different: dice actually have a function beyond blind chance, and you also have to keep track of ARMOUR, DEXTERITY and CHIVALRY scores in addition to your Life Force. There’s also new mechanics for money and provisions. This is all dangerously close to being a “proper” gamebook.

As mentioned, the gamebook quickly leaves the confines of the dungeon in favour of travelling the great outdoors in search for the Holy Grail – this book is certainly far more plot-orientated than its predecessors, insomuch as there appears to actually be one. The overall effect is that it feels much less like it’s capturing the spirit of the TV series (there are a lot of encounters that feel very different to anything from the previous three books – generally, it feels like the dungeon crawler nature of the first three books/series is easier to replicate in print, whereas now things have literally opened up, and perhaps as a result of this the recurring characters from the TV series are almost totally absent here), but it does feel like a book set in Knightmare’s expanded universe. The prose is much better, the puzzles are more intelligent than usual and there’s even some logical reasoning. It seems that Treguard’s development here is consistent with how he was being developed in the show at the time, and for all I’ve gone on about how the book is less in the spirit of the series, the introduction to the gamebook half (before we leave the dungeon) absolutely perfectly captures the feeling of the programme that year. It feels like the series is really going somewhere with this book.

Which is why what happened next is so very, very disappointing.

Knightmare: The Forbidden Gate

Published: 17 September 1992

Written by: Dave Morris

Illustrated by: David Rowe (Have a guess… actually, Rowe only did the cover this time round, and internal art was by Jan Thwaites, who actually was credited)

Here is Knightmare: The Forbidden Gate, alongside a copy of Knightmare 3: Fortress of Assassins.

Here are two more pictures illustrating one page from each of those two books.

Yes, as you may be able to tell, The Forbidden Gate marks a dramatic change in tone for the series. This book is expressly aimed at younger children, and is even under a different publishing label (moving from Corgi to Yearling). On top of the changes above, the gamebook runs to just ninety-seven bloody sections. The somewhat serious tone of the previous four novellas has been replaced with an exaggerated, anachronistic short story. Some creativity at least goes into the game design; dice are out again, but the player chooses one skill from a list at the beginning (seafaring, gambling, etc.) which at least means some playthroughs are a bit different, and codewords are used to keep track of events… but that’s about the only thing the book’s really got going for it. It continues with the more ‘open’ setting established by the last book, but it feels a lot less like Knightmare than any of the other four books do.

Knightmare: The Dragon’s Lair

Published: 21 October 1993

Written by: Dave Morris

Illustrated by: Internal art was done by the enigmatically-named “Arkadia”

And suffice to say The Dragon’s Lair is very much cut from the same cloth as The Forbidden Gate, so it’s hard to think of anything not mentioned above. I don’t know why the change was made; the very first page of The Dragon’s Lair describes itself as the sixth in the series, so it wasn’t meant to be some kind of separate line (despite the change in publishing label). The gamebook’s alright, ditching the skills from the last one but keeping the codewords, but (despite being a bit longer) is still very simplistic in comparison to any of the previous four. The novella is fun enough, but has virtually nothing to do with Knightmare, or indeed the ensuing gamebook. The result isn’t really very satisfying at all.

Overall, I cannot really recommend these books for ardent gamebook collectors (except maybe the fourth one), but if you were a huge Knightmare fan back in the day, you’re looking for a nostalgia kick and can find them really cheap, go for it (mostly for the novellas, granted).